October 09, 2011

Cramped Chicago: Half of the city's 2.7 million people live in park-poor areas; lakefront's parkland disguises severe shortage in many inland neighborhoods

Chicago's high-toned Latin motto, "Urbs in Horto" (City in a Garden), makes it sound as though the expansive open spaces of the city's lakefront extend to every corner of the city.

They don't.

Despite former Mayor Richard M. Daley's much-ballyhooed push for new parks and playgrounds, one-half of Chicago's 2.7 million people still live in community areas that fail to meet the city's own modest standard: For every 1,000 people, there should be 2 acres of open space, an area roughly the size of Soldier Field's entire playing surface.

Many of these areas have so little parkland that it is no exaggeration to call them "park deserts," a name that suggests a similarity to "food deserts," where healthy, affordable food is hard to obtain.

Indeed, the park deserts extract a comparable human toll, denying children and adults a place to exercise, cutting them off from contact with nature, and robbing them of a chance to form bonds of community.

In Brighton Park, just south of the industrial corridor along the Stevenson Expressway, 45,368 people share just 10.6 acres of open space. By comparison, northwest suburban Buffalo Grove, population 41,496, has more than 400 acres of parks, playgrounds, sports fields, bicycle trails and picnic areas.

"We need more parks," Danny Martinez, 11, said last Sunday as he tossed a football to his brother on the sidewalk in the 3900 block of South Artesian Avenue.

"Sometimes we play in the backyard," Danny added, "but it's boring."

Related story: Daley expanded Chicago's park space, but progress turns out to be more limited than previously thought.

In Avondale, part of a cluster of park-poor communities along the Chicago River on the Northwest Side, there is so little open space that Esmeralda McCullough and her 6-year-old son play volleyball on a makeshift court that consists of the family's tiny backyard and the alley. A black metal fence between them serves as the net.

"Chicago should invest in some parks," McCullough said.

The severe open-space shortage confronts new Mayor Rahm Emanuel with a major policy challenge: How to expand the city's network of parks and other open spaces at a time of fiscal austerity?

The implications go beyond greenery: For centuries, parks have played an essential role in making cities livable, providing a respite from noise and clutter, bringing together people of different races and classes, and creating a framework that boosted real estate development.

Due to the foresight of urban planners like Daniel Burnham, Chicago has by and large realized these benefits along its spectacular lakefront. But turn a spotlight on the city's little-noticed inland neighborhoods, and the picture changes:

•Thirty-two of Chicago's 77 official community areas don't meet the city's 2-acres-per-1,000-people open-space standard, according to a new open-space inventory by city officials. The population of these areas is nearly 1.35 million people, half the city's total.

•Twenty-nine of the deficient areas are off the city's lakefront, while just three — the Near North Side, Edgewater and Rogers Park — are along the shoreline. Ironically, many communities with names that suggest pastoral tranquillity, such as Brighton Park, West Lawn and Avondale, are in fact park-poor.

•At least a dozen more community areas meet the city standard but harbor sub-areas where residents live more than half a mile from the nearest open space in Chicago. Public space advocates say such a distance makes it difficult for people to walk to parks, discouraging everyday use.

•A majority of the city's community areas do not meet 1990 national guidelines for providing enough playgrounds, baseball diamonds and swimming pools, new city statistics show. The Chicago Park District, which once followed those guidelines, now characterizes them as an artificial, one-size-fits-all standard.

•The open space shortage transcends racial and economic lines. It affects neighborhoods that are predominantly white, black and Hispanic, as well as neighborhoods whose household incomes are above and below the city average.

While park acreage is the most popular yardstick, open-space advocates and public officials around the country are increasingly looking at a complex variety of factors that determine whether public spaces truly serve the public:

Is it easy for pedestrians to reach them? Does public transit go there? Do people feel safe there or threatened by gangs? How up-to-date and well-designed are their facilities? Do the parks invite use by people of all ages? Are they meeting demand or overwhelmed by demand?

Consider what's happened to a year-old artificial-turf soccer field and running track in the park-poor Northwest Side neighborhood of Albany Park. At times, the field is so overcrowded that players limit their game to one half of the field, playing from side to side rather than end to end. Unable to use the real goals at the ends of the field, they drag in plastic garbage cans to serve as makeshift goals.

"When I go to the suburbs, it's a whole different story," said Arnel Gredelj, 23, who goes to the field a few times a week. "There's space everywhere. Here, it's very limited."

Parks behind profits

What exactly is open space? And how much of it is enough? Cities are different from suburbs, after all. They thrive on dense clusters of homes and businesses. But cities can also be too dense for their own good.

Kathy Dickhut, a deputy commissioner in the city's Department of Housing and Economic Development, defines open space as outdoor land that's open to the public and can be used for recreation. The city's 12,000 acres of open space include Chicago Park District parks, Cook County forest preserves within the city's borders, land around Lake Calumet, community gardens and playgrounds at public schools. The city's historic boulevards, with their grassy medians, also count.

For years, nationally accepted standards called for 6 to 10 acres of parkland for every 1,000 residents. But in the 1990s, the National Recreation and Park Association also suggested that each city establish its own standard based on its growth patterns.

In Chicago, those patterns were defined by building booms that transformed the city after the Great Fire, covering block after block of the city's relentless grid of streets with homes, shops and factories. As Chicago's population exploded from less than 300,000 in 1870 to a peak of more than 3.6 million in 1950, parks invariably ranked behind profits on the civic priority list.

"The older industrial areas were so jammed by the expansion of factories that any kind of open space was considered to be sort of a luxury," said Perry Duis, a University of Illinois at Chicago historian. Beer gardens and amusement parks provided open space, but the drinks and the rides were not free.

"It's just logical," Duis said. "Chicago is the most thoroughly capitalistic city there is."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a trio of great inland parks — Humboldt, Douglas and Garfield — brought picturesque lagoons and vast meadows to the city's West Side.

Yet despite these and other spasms of reform, such as the innovative neighborhood parks built amid the South Side's tenements in 1905, things did not change much. Even the 1909 publication of Burnham's "Plan of Chicago" (left) gave only a minor push to inland parks, putting its major emphasis on the creation of a continuous chain of lakefront parks and a network of forest preserves.

When millions of African-Americans moved to Chicago from the South during the "Great Migration" from 1916 to 1970, a new factor compounded the city's chronic shortage of open land: the intersection of public space and racial politics.

In 1982, the federal government filed a lawsuit alleging that the Chicago Park District had discriminated against black and Hispanic neighborhoods in providing programs and facilities. To address the inequities, Park District officials scrambled to add land that would allow them to build new facilities. Yet when the district set open-space goals in 1990, Chicago's neighborhoods were so densely built that planners stuck to the city's longtime standard of 2 acres of open space for every 1,000 residents.

"Our regional park system can easily mislead us … into thinking that Chicago meets high standards of park and recreation needs," the district's 1990 Land Policies Plan stated. "Unfortunately, very many neighborhoods throughout the city are woefully underserved with recreational opportunities."

That report, issued one year after Daley began his 22-year run in office, and a 1998 city-backed plan called CitySpace set the tone for an aggressive expansion of open space that reflected the mayor's reputation as a tree-hugger.

Concrete and asphalt around public schools were turned into playgrounds — more than 270 acres of them. More than 13 miles of riverfront trails were added. Overall, the city's total open space rose to some 12,000 acres, or 4.45 acres per 1,000 residents.

Despite these gains, Chicago will rank 14th among 19 densely populated U.S. cities in parkland per 1,000 residents in a soon-to-be-released survey by The Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco-based advocacy group.

Roughly a quarter of Chicago's 12,000 acres of open space remains concentrated on the lakefront.

Local parks away from the shoreline are "the missing link," said Erma Tranter, president of the Chicago group Friends of the Parks.

'Very few places for kids'

To grasp the human impact of that problem, come to the city's most park-poor neighborhood, Brighton Park.

Brighton Park used to be heavily Polish and Lithuanian, but from 1990 to 2010, immigrants from Mexico dramatically changed its character and density, driving up its population by nearly 41 percent. Yet since 1998, city statistics show, the neighborhood added less than 3 acres of open space. In contrast, the neighborhood's Corwith intermodal hub, where workers transfer shipping containers between trains and trucks, sprawls over 388 acres, an expanse larger than Grant Park.

Brighton Park's largest park, the 7-acre Kelly Park at 41st Street and California Avenue, is tiny by comparison. And it must double as a Chicago Park District venue for outdoor recreation and a practice field for the sports teams at the adjoining Kelly High School. Such overuse turned its grass and dirt into a bumpy moonscape. Facilities, like a playground with an old metal jungle gym and wood chips on the ground, are outdated. The park has no continuous loop for walking or jogging, an absence that park advocates say reflects a mindset from another time.

"In industrial times, people's jobs were physically demanding," said Lucy Gomez-Feliciano, a health organizer for the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, who confronts similar problems on the city's North Side. "Now you're seeing adults using parks to stay fit."

The lack of space for exercise blunts efforts to control childhood obesity.

"There are very few places for the kids to play," said Patrick Brosnan, executive director of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council.

Local parents agree. Wary of Kelly Park because it's overcrowded — and, they say, infiltrated by gangs — they keep their children at home.

"If there was more space, (the children) would have more freedom. … They would be able to socialize more," said Amalia Montoya, mother of two children.

Another mother, Mayra Garcia, recounted how her landlord, fearful that grass will be trampled, does not allow her children to play in the backyard. Last year, her teenage son Jose was outside and crossed the street when he heard the bells of an ice cream truck. A fast-moving car hit him, bruising his ribs, Garcia said.

A boulevard barrier

At first glance, a ready answer to Brighton Park's open-space problems appears just across Western Avenue. It's McKinley Park, whose nearly 70 acres include a serene lagoon. Last Sunday, russet-brown mallards paddled across the waterway, a man fished from a boardwalk and another man jogged nearby with his dog on a leash.

Getting to this Shangri-La from Brighton Park, however, is no easy task. For pedestrians, Western Avenue is a virtual Great Wall of China. Its grassy median is surrounded on each side by four traffic lanes, over which cars and trucks typically rumble by at 40 mph. At Pershing and Western, parkgoers run into a forest of pillars supporting two rail lines and the CTA Orange Line tracks.

"In order to enjoy green space you have to engage in dangerous activity," Brosnan said.

Such access problems occur throughout Chicago as rail lines, highways and major arterial roads raise intimidating barriers to parkland.

The presence of gangs, either in parks or on streets around them, raises another hurdle that discourages people like Noemi Velazquez and her sons from using open space.

Standing on her porch on the 4200 block of West Iowa Avenue, Velazquez said she takes the boys to Lincoln Park to avoid the gangs. "If I bring my kids (to Humboldt Park), the gangs will mess with them," she said. Other city parents drive their children to close-in suburbs, such as Oak Park and Evanston, to reach safe parks.

Even when Chicagoans are lucky enough to reach open space, they may find that it suddenly stops, instead of running continuously, as it does along the 18.5-mile lakefront trail.

A classic example occurs around the Addison Street bridge over the Chicago River, a few miles west of Wrigley Field. On one end of the bridge is Clark Park. On the other, California Park. The only way for parkgoers to get from one to the other is to maneuver onto heavily trafficked Addison and cross the bridge. Few do. City officials would like to build a pedestrian bridge to close this gap (left), but it won't appear for at least five years, they acknowledge.

Without links between the trails, "it's more difficult to walk and bike places, plain and simple," said Ron Burke, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for walking, biking and transit. Short trails are fine for getting to the grocery, Burke said, but the city needs a network of trails connecting people to key destinations, along with the on-street protected bike lanes that Emanuel's administration has begun to build.

Weeds, broken glass

In contrast to the park-poor communities of the Northwest and Southwest sides, where the problem is too little open space, the problem in some parts of the South Side is too much.

Drive south from the Loop down Halsted Street, past the old Chicago Stockyards and into a tier of heavily African-American neighborhoods, and you see once-prosperous commercial streets lined with vacant lots.

Of Chicago's 33,144 vacant lots, about half are concentrated on the South and West sides, according to Kelley Quinn, a spokeswoman for the Cook County assessor's office.

In areas like Englewood, which lost nearly a quarter of its population during the last decade, Chicago is a shrinking city, one that resembles the vast emptiness of inner-city Detroit. Yet this open space, with its weeds and broken glass, is the last place parents would want their kids to play.

In still-dense South Side areas, such as Greater Grand Crossing, surface streets and elevated highways, such as the Chicago Skyway, cut off people from large parks.

"What happens is that we all crowd into Hoard Park," said Ayoka Samuels, senior program director at the Gary Comer Youth Center at 72nd and South Chicago Avenue, referring to a 21/2-acre park near the center.

Because of the lack of room, she said, boys put basketball hoops in the street and play there. Or kids turn to other things, not all of them positive.

"Sometimes they will engage in risky sex practices because they don't have anything to do," Samuels said. "Sometimes they dabble in drugs. Sometimes they'll dabble into the gangs. Sometimes they'll dabble into crime." Or the kids stay at home "and do nothing. They watch TV and they eat Oreos and that's it."

Finding an answer

So what can be done to create more parkland in the city's off-lakefront neighborhoods?

The Chicago Park District's 2011-15 capital improvement plan foresees more than $306 million in projects. That sounds like a lot of money. But it's not much compared with the more than $1 billion that Chicago lavished on two lakefront mega-projects in the first decade of the 21st century. The city and private interests spent $600 million on the renovation of Soldier Field and about $500 million on Millennium Park.

Chicago's controversial tax-increment financing districts, which are supposed to use anticipated gains in tax revenue to finance improvements to parks and other infrastructure, have supported more than $75 million in park district projects, district officials said. But city neighborhoods without TIFs — or those whose TIFs aren't generating new revenue — can't use this tool to create or improve open space.

"If you're not a community that benefits from that tool, then we just need to work harder to find partners for those projects or do it on our own dime," said Gia Biagi, the district's director of planning and development. By "partners," she was referring to state grants or private contributions for parkland.

Emanuel has signaled his willingness to tackle the issue, declaring in his transition plan that "despite increases in park acreage, many neighborhoods remain underserved." And he promised that a task force of public space experts would "create a vision and plan for city spaces."

That vision was to be unveiled during the mayor's first 100 days in office.

As of Sunday, though, it is 47 days overdue.

COMING NEXT SUNDAY: How Chicago is addressing its open-space problem and what it could learn from other cities.

Comments

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Seriously? Comparing the open space in the suburbs to the city?

BK: Yes, because it puts the city's shortage in context for our readers, most of whom live in the suburbs. But the main thrust of the story is to contrast city neighborhoods AGAINST CHICAGO'S OWN STANDARD. And as the story makes clear, many neighborhoods come up woefully short.